From Lawyering to Loving

Preached at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church

On July 11, 2004

By the Rev. Thomas C. Davis, III

Texts:

Luke 10: 25-37

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  "What is written in the Law?" he replied.  "How do you read it?"  He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"  "You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."  But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"  In reply Jesus said: "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. 'Look after him,' he said, 'and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.'  "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?"  The expert in the law replied, "The one who had mercy on him."  Jesus told him, "Go and do likewise."

Mark 12: 28-34

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"  "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these."  "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."  When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

Sermon Text

My son is studying to become a lawyer.  He's a good and honest man, but he will have to prove it, because lawyers get a mighty bad rap these days. Do you know how lawyers sleep?  First they lie on one side and then on the other.  When you're taking a picture of a group of lawyers, do you know how to get them to smile?  Just say, "Fees!"  And, what do you call a smiling, sober, courteous person at a bar association convention? The caterer.  There are hundreds of jokes like these, which apparently help to salve the resentment toward members of this once enviable profession.

In Jesus' day, lawyers got a bad rap too.   In our Christian scriptures they come across as irksome religious knit pickers, always looking for a way to trip Jesus up.  Our first story this morning begins: "an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus."  Why would he do that?  To take Jesus down a few pegs, obviously.  Jesus was getting too popular with the people.  He was threatening the status quo.  He was challenging the masses to think for themselves, and honor God instead of the broad hierarchy of persons who had set themselves up as God's viceroys and spokesmen, a hierarchy that included emperors and kings at the top, nobility and high priests a little lower, then ordinary priests, and near the bottom, the religious lawyers, the scribes and Pharisees.  These learned but low functionaries were much more vulnerable to shake-ups in the system than people higher up, because they had so little power.  So they were constantly on the lookout for challenges to their wee authority, lest they be displaced by some new rising star, like Jesus.  Jesus got very angry with them on occasion.  I suppose he expected them to have compassion for people still lower than they, because they were so low on the totem pole themselves.  He said to them once, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones. . . (Matthew 23: 26-28). And on another occasion, Jesus criticized them because they "tied up heavy burdens and laid them on peoples' backs, but then didn't lift a finger to remove them." (Matthew 23: 4).  Usually, though, Jesus replied to their suspicious questioning with compassion, for he realized that they too were trapped by the system, and needed to be set free.

In this morning's reading from Luke, an expert in religious law, one of these pitiful but sometimes contemptible minor players fires a question to make Jesus look bad and bolster his own authority:  "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks Jesus.  Jesus knocks the ball right back into his court.  "Well, what does the law say, Mr. Lawyer.  You tell me.  How do you read the law?"  Uh oh!  The lawyer had wanted to put Jesus on the hot seat, but now he finds himself there.  He's cool, though.  He can handle this. He will simply quote the law, instead of interpreting it, which might leave him open to criticism: "The law says: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and,'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

Right, says Jesus, sincerely.  You've got it!  Now just do that, and you'll have the eternal life you're seeking.

But, of course, it won't be that easy for this learned but pitiful peon, still caught in a system of domination, and still worried about defending his fragile place in it.  The scripture notes that he has to justify himself.  He can't just let go of his old ways all at once. He has to stick to lawyering. Why?  Because his whole life long, lawyering has been the only way he's known to claim even a meager status. Can you relate to that? Can you see yourself in him?  This guy isn't a villain.  He's a poor schmuck, stuck like you and me, unable to break free from tested ways of surviving in a system that chews up little people and spits them out.  The only way he knows to avoid being chewed up is to stay in the ruthless game and play it as best he can. 

So, let's take stock of where he stands in his risky conversation with Jesus.  On the outside he's cool. He hasn't lost face.  He has answered adequately, and Jesus has refrained from putting him on the spot again by posing another question. So, the lawyer is even-Stephen.  He can easily walk away now, unscathed.  But he doesn't. He tarries to ask another question--in order to justify himself, says scripture.  But to whom?  Why, to the guy he must greet in the mirror every morning.  He tarries to justify himself to himself.  He tarries because--God bless him!-- he has just dared to consider whether the old game is worth playing anymore; or whether there is another way of being in the world that is much truer, much closer to God's intention.  It seems to me that he has sensed this way in Jesus, but he doesn't know it well enough yet to ask an intelligent question about it.  Moved by the Spirit, he can only blurt out,  "Yes, but, who is my neighbor?" 

If you do a word search in your Bible concordance for the word,  "neighbor," you will notice that almost always it stands for the person to whom one is supposed or not supposed to do something.  For instance, "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house," or, "thou must not bear false witness against thy neighbor."  "Neighbor," in other words, is an abstraction.  It stands for any human being who would be wronged by a sin of omission or commission.  Since in the Hebrew laws the word, "neighbor," is an abstraction, since it may stand for any person at all, it tends not to grab one emotionally.  That's why Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan is such an ingenious reply to the lawyer's question, "But, who is my neighbor?"  It incarnates the idea of neighbor so that the lawyer won't be able to use "neighbor" abstractly anymore. 

We all have to put flesh and bones on the idea of "neighbor" if we are rightly to grasp what it means.  In Michael Moore's recent movie, a grieving mother who has lost her son to the war in Iraq journeys to the White House to leave a piece of her mind there. Almost arrived, she encounters a proponent of the war who objects to her protestations.  "What do you know about this?" the objector complains.  "Everything," the mother retorts.  My son died.  I am not protesting about abstractions.  My son died!"

Once we put flesh and bones on "the neighbor," then compassion takes over, and there is almost no need for the law in order to do the right thing. 

It's interesting that Jesus makes a Samaritan the moral hero of his tale.  Jews were very resentful of the Samaritans for claiming to be just as beloved and chosen by God as Jews are.  The Samaritans had their own scriptures, and they had a temple at Schechem which rivaled the Jewish one in Jerusalem.  However, the Samaritan in Jesus' story isn't a shining moral example because he scrupulously measures his behavior in accordance with religious laws.  In fact, there are two other people in the story, a priest and a Levite, who are the lawyering type; and both of them pass by on the other side.  The Samaritan, however, acts immediately. He hastens to help, because "neighbor" for him is not an abstraction which he can conveniently draw lines around in order to to spare himself danger or inconvenience.  For him, "neighbor" is that bleeding, dying stranger lying in the road. Compassion for that very real neighbor moves him to do the right thing.  If we put flesh and blood on "neighbor," we are much more likely to love than to lawyer, much more likely to live out God's law that we must love our neighbors as ourselves.

I will close with a story shared by a recent New Castle Presbytery visitor to General Assembly.  This visitor was attending a discussion about the inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in the church. During the discussion, a woman in a wheel chair rolled up to the microphone.  She confessed that she had not long had an interest in these issues, and had not been a proponent for gays' and lesbians' concerns. "But today," she said, "I have changed my mind.  Because when I tried to get into this meeting, I couldn't find an elevator, and nobody was there to carry me up the stairs.  I wanted to come in very badly, but had to wait a long, long time to get in.  And now I have come to understand in one afternoon what these people must have been feeling for years. 

Yes, when we put flesh and bones on the idea of neighbor, then we can begin to live by the law that says "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."  We can begin to move from lawyering to loving.